How to remove a network drive from Windows Explorer when it doesn’t want to go away.

You know the story, you pop in a flash drive, it doesn’t appear on your drives list but you notice you have this disconnected network drive that’s been hanging on for a while to a computer that doesn’t exist anymore. You double click the network drive and sure enough, Windows takes you to the Flash drive that it can’t find. You can disconnect the drive, try to delete, drag it to the recycle bin and it will resurrect itself (it never actually goes to any of those places, so I guess it doesn’t actually resurrect itself). Anyway, here’s a few steps to get rid of it:

Click Start

Right click “Computer” and choose “Map Network Drive”.

Map a network drive with the same letter of the drive you want to get rid of. If you don’t have a network drive, use this “\YourComputerNameC$”. It will map to the root of your C drive. Now here the important part, uncheck “Reconnect at Login”. You don’t want to reconnect.

Right click on the drive in the drives section of “Computer” (can’t help by saying “my computer” still). Choose “Disconnect”.